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  1. Home
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  3. The English Wits
  • Cited by 39
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Online publication date:
September 2009
Print publication year:
2007
Online ISBN:
9780511483844
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511483844
Subjects:
Literature, Renaissance and Early Modern Literature
Information

Book description

In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries the Inns of Court and fashionable London taverns developed a culture of clubbing, urban sociability and wit. The convivial societies that emerged created rituals to define social identities and to engage in literary play and political discussion. Michelle O'Callaghan argues that the lawyer-wits, including John Hoskyns, in company with authors such as John Donne, Ben Jonson and Thomas Coryate, consciously reinvigorated humanist traditions of learned play. Their experiments with burlesque, banquet literature, parody and satire resulted in a volatile yet creative dialogue between civility and licence, and between pleasure and the violence of scurrilous words. The wits inaugurated a mode of literary fellowship that shaped the history and literature of sociability in the seventeenth century. This study will provide many insights for historians and literary scholars of the period.

Reviews

"In the course of examining the complex experiments with, and productions of wit during the period, O'Callaghan opens a space for scholars to further explore the ways in which literary texts correspond with the physical and social localities in which they were first produced."
-Adam Kitzes, University of North Dakota, Renaissance Quarterly

"Michelle O'Callaghan provides a strong contribution to making the old new again in her study...her work brilliantly succeeds precisely by making semiforgotten Jacobeans such as Thomas Coryat relevant to a much broader culture of wit."
Catherine Gimelli Martin, University of Memphis, Studies in English Literature

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